July 09, 2020
BioPharmGuy News
If your company is interested in sponsoring our newsletter for up to four weeks, we would love to have you. We're at 4200 subscribers with a typical open rate of 25-30% and keep growing by the day.

One of the newsletters we have liked for a while is Endpoints News . It's a daily that is more serious/journalistic. They have a good team including longtime biotech reporter John Carroll. Their Early Edition is an aggregation of important/interesting science and biotech news and their main newsletter, Endpoints, is their own in-house journalism focusing on the drug industry. They cover big drug news plus funding and some other stuff. Give it a lookie-loo.

BioPharmGuy

LinkedIn
Got a LinkedIn request from a couple with a shared account. Job title is listed as CEO. So are they each half a CEO or are they co-CEOs? Upon deeper investigation, they are 'marketing coaches' who can increase your annual revenue by $50k without spending any money on advertising - Guaranteed . Will also provide DNA sequences for several unicorn subspecies upon request. #hustlin

Traffic
May/June, top five countries for BioPharmGuy visitors: 

US - 51.0%
UK - 10.4%
India - 8.2%
Canada - 3.4%
Germany - 3.3%

It turns out for both the US & UK, 0.014% of the population visits BioPharmGuy every month. We made it!

June Funding Summary
We tracked $4.1B in private company funding plus 13 IPOs for $2.6B in June. Pandemic be damned, there's still a tremendous amount of investor cash swimming around the globe. Funding summary file available on our downloads page .

Addition & Attrition
We added 16 companies this week, removed three. As always, summary available on our downloads page .
Industry
Moderna
The golden child who still won't release the rest of their phase 1 data (52 days and counting) has hit their first snag and changed their phase 3 protocol, delaying their vaccine trial slightly. Reports came from anonymous investigators, not Moderna itself. Not surprising - they aren't fans of publicizing things that do not directly jack up their stock price. 

They did later do a press release stating the trial will still start in July. No mention at all of the delay, so it may have been a one-week delay, maybe three.

That press release was mostly about the largely irrelevant, 600-person phase 2 trial. All a phase 2 vaccine trial can show is reactive antibodies in the blood and things like that. The purpose is to help in your decision to go to phase 3 - it cannot show protection from a disease because the number of participants isn't large enough. But Moderna's phase 3 is already happening no matter what - they got a bunch of free money from the government and they're damn sure gonna spend it.

Last thing - their Chief Medical Officer continues to exercise options and sell 100% of his stock as soon as possible. He bagged another couple million this week and as usual, currently holds no shares. Just what you want from the guy running your clinical trials.

Pfizer
One of the adults of the industry has taken a different tack with their COVID mRNA vaccine work. Pfizer waited until they had actual results to publicize them . How novel! These results showed an increase in neutralizing antibodies, so, with their partner BioNTech, they will begin a phase 3 trial in July. Pfizer will still face the uncertainty of mass-manufacturing a new drug modality, but at least they're conducting themselves professionally. Pretty impressive for a supposedly sclerotic dinosaur of a company to be running neck-and-neck with a biotech darling in this vaccine race for the ages.

Palo Alto Health Sciences
This company describes itself as " a privately held Silicon Valley digital therapeutic company ". Commute time by car from their office to the heart of Palo Alto is 13 hours per Google maps. No, Bay Area traffic isn't that bad (yet), but rather the company is located in Kirkland, WA. Ah yes, that valley of silicon stretching 850 miles north. 

Unnecessarily complicated website
What is going on here ? ExCellThera is a cell therapy company that thinks they're selling interior design services. The home page took about ten seconds to load and that was apparently by design because they had an actual loading bar like we're downloading today's iTunes update. The landing page is some sort of multi-colored flower whose petals lead you to different sections of the website. Click a petal and it flies away while the screen fills in with the petal color...eventually the page you want finally opens. Random animations everywhere. Side scrolling pages. Doesn't get more overdone than this.
Health & Science
Hydroxychloroquine
Oh sweet sassy. Here we go again. The political drug that will not die has been thrust back into the spotlight by Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. They released a 'retrospective observational study' showing supposed life-saving benefit to patients. This so-called study is nothing more than a perusal of medical records. There was no control group, this was just doctors, in the heat of battle giving different treatments to different patients based on whatever they saw or had at hand in the darkest moments of the crisis. That is not data that can be used to decide if a drug works.

In this 'study', the group who received no medicine at all was on average five years older than the groups of people who received drugs. 64% of the no-drug group was over 65 years old vs. only 45-49% in the various drug groups. This is a real embarrassment to Henry Ford Hospital.

To know if a drug works, you randomly assign people to the drug or placebo/standard of care. Then you look at who fared better. Many groups in many countries have already done just that with this drug and have basically all shown the same thing - it doesn't work.

Testing
Despite what some cranks would try to have you believe, more testing is not the reason we are seeing astronomical spikes in some states' case counts. We are seeing those spikes because the disease is running rampant after state/local governments and citizens chose to not take the pandemic seriously.

New York is now testing far more people per day than when the epidemic was raging earlier this year and they are seeing far, far fewer positive cases. The reason is simple - New Yorkers took it seriously, from the governor down to the citizenry. It's too bad these other states had to sacrifice the health of thousands of their residents before accepting reality. Better late than never, though.

US COVID numbers
A friendly public service announcement - you cannot lump case counts for the entire U.S. together and draw meaningful conclusions from them.

Below is a rough chart of weekly case counts in the U.S. Weeks 1-14 are basically accurate, weeks 15-17 are estimates if a flattening of case counts occurs. (not likely)
The blue bars are new infections diagnosed each week; the orange line is the crude death rate (deaths/cases) assuming 1% of people die exactly two weeks after diagnosis.


You can see that once case counts start to ramp up suddenly, the cumulative crude fatality rate drops. And what's more, it takes over six weeks for it to return back to what it was before the case explosion, not two weeks like you might expect with this 'two weeks until death' assumption we made. So paradoxically, a massive increase in case count makes the crude death rate seem to improve for a long time. This is nothing more than a statistical anomaly because of the quantity of new cases.

The main lesson to draw from this example is that if you see U.S. case counts going up quickly and the death rate noticeably dropping, it's not necessarily a sign of hospitals getting better at treating things or younger people getting it, etc, but more likely a statistical artifact of a rapidly expanding pandemic. Death totals are not affected by this anomaly, so they will still hold some info.

America is too large of a land mass to draw useful conclusions from lumping in total case counts - we are a nation of regions. Regional information matters far more.

WHO does stuff
Congress has officially received notification that El Presidente is pulling America out of the WHO. There will now be a one-year withdrawal timeline.

Attempting to pull out of the WHO during a raging pandemic is bad enough, but since the WHO is responsible for tracking flu viruses circulating around the world, they are also the main body that determines what strains are included in the annual vaccine. 

Since America doesn't have flu monitoring stations throughout Asia and the southern hemisphere, it's kind of problematic considering we are the world's biggest consumer of flu vaccines. There will no longer be an established mechanism for Asian countries to share virus samples/information with the CDC. How the CDC will determine what strains to include in a vaccine going forward is anyone's guess given their new seat on the outside looking in. 

2020: New pandemic plus the classics
You may not have known, but bubonic plague still exists, mostly in Africa and Asia. A couple cases were found in rural China this week and last year a couple in Mongolia died of plague due to eating raw marmot meat. And there you have the first use of the phrase 'raw marmot meat' in the history of this newsletter. The good news is we have antibiotics nowadays, but enough already, 2020.
Sign Up Here
If you were forwarded this email and would like to join our mailing list, here is our sign-up page: https://biopharmguy.com/subscribe.php
Premium Listings Always Available
Promote your Company's Listing
Check your website analytics - we are likely one of your top referrers. You can quickly double or triple those referrals with a Premium Listing. You can try it for as short as one month. Full summary of all our upgrade options available here: Promoted Listings . Reply to this email or send a message if interested.